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Making PDFs Accessible for Visually Impaired Users (and Findable for Everybody Else)

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Linking Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries (TPDL 2023)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 14241))

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Abstract

We treat documents released under the Dutch Freedom of Information Act as FAIR scientific data and find that they are not findable nor accessible, due to text malformations caused by redaction software. Our aim is to repair these documents. We propose a simple but strong heuristic for detecting wrongly OCRed text segments, and we then repair only these OCR mistakes by prompting a large language model. This makes the documents better findable through full text search, but the repaired PDFs do still not adhere to accessibility standards. Converting them into HTML documents, keeping all essential layout and markup, makes them not only accessible to the visually impaired, but also reduces their size by up to two orders of magnitude. The costs of this way of repairing are roughly one dollar for the 17K pages in our corpus, which is very little compared to the large gains in information quality.

Github: https://github.com/irlabamsterdam/accessibilifier.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://www.w3.org/TR/low-vision-needs/.

  2. 2.

    https://www.iso.org/standard/58625.html.

  3. 3.

    https://github.com/OpenTaal/opentaal-wordlist.

  4. 4.

    https://linux.die.net/man/1/pdftohtml.

  5. 5.

    https://github.com/salesforce/LAVIS.

  6. 6.

    https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/on-demand/.

  7. 7.

    https://openai.com/pricing.

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Acknowledgements

This research was supported in part by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) through the ACCESS project grant CISC.CC.016.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Information Retrieval Lab, Informatics Institute, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands

    Ruben van Heusden, Hazel Ling, Lars Nelissen & Maarten Marx

Authors
  1. Ruben van Heusden
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  2. Hazel Ling
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  3. Lars Nelissen
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  4. Maarten Marx
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Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Ruben van Heusden or Maarten Marx .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Amazon, Santa Clara, CA, USA

    Omar Alonso

  2. DataCite, Hannover, Germany

    Helena Cousijn

  3. University of Padua, Padua, Italy

    Gianmaria Silvello

  4. Europeana Foundation, BE Den Haag, The Netherlands

    Mónica Marrero

  5. University of Porto, Porto, Portugal

    Carla Teixeira Lopes

  6. University of Padua, Padua, Italy

    Stefano Marchesin

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© 2023 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG

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van Heusden, R., Ling, H., Nelissen, L., Marx, M. (2023). Making PDFs Accessible for Visually Impaired Users (and Findable for Everybody Else). In: Alonso, O., Cousijn, H., Silvello, G., Marrero, M., Teixeira Lopes, C., Marchesin, S. (eds) Linking Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries. TPDL 2023. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 14241. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43849-3_21

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-43849-3_21

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-031-43848-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-031-43849-3

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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